Chapter 23 - Fire Rises

THERE WAS a change on the village where the fountain fell, and where
the mender of roads went forth daily to hammer out of the stones on
the highway such morsels of bread as might serve for patches to hold
his poor ignorant soul and his poor reduced body together. The
prison on the crag was not so dominant as of yore; there were soldiers
to guard it, but not many; there were officers to guard the
soldiers, but not one of them knew what his men would do- beyond this:
that it would probably not be what he was ordered.

Far and wide lay a rained country, yielding nothing but
desolation. Every green leaf, every blade of grass and blade of grain,
was as shrivelled and poor as the miserable people. Everything was
bowed down, dejected, oppressed, and broken. Habitations, fences,
domesticated animals, men, women, children, and the soil that bore
them- all worn out.

Monseigneur (often a most worthy individual gentleman) was a
national blessing, gave a chivalrous tone to things, was a polite
example of luxurious and shining life, and a great deal more to
equal purpose; nevertheless, Monseigneur as a class had, somehow or
other, brought things to this. Strange that Creation, designed
expressly for Monseigneur, should be so soon wrung dry and squeezed
out! There must be something shortsighted in the eternal arrangements,
surely! Thus it was, however; and the last drop of blood having
been extracted from the flints, and the last screw of the rack
having been turned so often that its purchase crumbled, and it now
turned and turned with nothing to bite, Monseigneur began to run
away from a phenomenon so low and unaccountable.

But, this was not the change on the village, and on many a village
like it. For scores of years gone by, Monseigneur had squeezed it
and wrung it, and had seldom graced it with his presence except for
the pleasures of the chase- now, found in hunting the people; now,
found in hunting the beasts, for whose preservation Monseigneur made
edifying spaces of barbarous and barren wilderness. No. The change
consisted in the appearance of strange faces of low caste, rather than
in the disappearance of the high caste, chiselled, and otherwise
beautified and beautifying features of Monseigneur.

For, in these times, as the mender of roads worked, solitary, in the
dust, not often troubling himself to reflect that dust he was and to
dust he must return, being for the most part too much occupied in
thinking how little he had for supper and how much more he would eat
if he had it- in these times, as he raised his eyes from his lonely
labour, and viewed the prospect, he would see some rough figure
approaching on foot, the like of which was once a rarity in those
parts, but was now a frequent presence. As it advanced, the mender
of roads would discern without surprise, that it was a shaggy-haired
man, of almost barbarian aspect, tall, in wooden shoes that were
clumsy even to the eyes of a mender of roads, grim, rough, swart,
steeped in the mud and dust of many highways, dank with the marshy
moisture of many low grounds, sprinkled with the thorns and leaves and
moss of many byways through woods.

Such a man came upon him, like a ghost, at noon in the July weather,
as he sat on his heap of stones under a bank, taking such shelter as
he could get from a shower of hail.

The man looked at him, looked at the village in the hollow, at the
mill, and at the prison on the crag. When he had identified these
objects in what benighted mind he had, he said, in a dialect that
was just intelligible:

"How goes it, Jacques?"

"All well, Jacques."

"Touch then!"

They joined hands, and the man sat down on the heap of stones.

"No dinner?"

"Nothing but supper now," said the mender of roads, with a hungry
face.

"It is the fashion," growled the man. "I meet no dinner anywhere."

He took out a blackened pipe, filled it, lighted it with flint and
steel, pulled at it until it was in a bright glow: then, suddenly held
it from him and dropped something into it from between his finger
and thumb, that blazed and went out in a puff of smoke.

"Touch then." It was the turn of the mender of roads to say it
this time, after observing these operations. They again joined hands.

"To-night?" said the mender of roads.

"To-night," said the man, putting the pipe in his mouth.

"Where?"

"Here."

He and the mender of roads sat on the heap of stones looking
silently at one another, with the hail driving in between them like
a pigmy charge of bayonets, until the sky began to clear over the
village.

"Show me!" said the traveller then, moving to the brow of the hill.

"See!" returned the mender of roads, with extended finger. "You go
down here, and straight through the street, and past the fountain--"

"To the Devil with all that!" interrupted the other, rolling his eye
over the landscape. "I go through no streets and past no fountains.
Well?"

"Well! About two leagues beyond the summit of that hill above the
village."

"Good. When do you cease to work?"

"At sunset."

"Will you wake me, before departing? I have walked two nights
without resting. Let me finish my pipe, and I shall sleep like a
child. Will you wake me?"

"Surely."

The wayfarer smoked his pipe out, put it in his breast, slipped
off his great wooden shoes, and lay down on his back on the heap of
stones. He was fast asleep directly.

As the road-mender plied his dusty labour, and the hail-clouds,
rolling away, revealed bright bars and streaks of sky which were
responded to by silver gleams upon the landscape, the little man
(who wore a red cap now, in place of his blue one) seemed fascinated
by the figure on the heap of stones. His eyes were so often turned
towards it, that he used his tools mechanically, and, one would have
said, to very poor account. The bronze face, the shaggy black hair and
beard, the coarse woollen red cap, the rough medley dress of home-spun
stuff and hairy skins of beasts, the powerful frame attenuated by
spare living, and the sullen and desperate compression of the lips
in sleep, inspired the mender of roads with awe. The traveller had
travelled far, and his feet were footsore, and his ankles chafed and
bleeding; his great shoes, stuffed with leaves and grass, had been
heavy to drag over the many long leagues, and his clothes were
chafed into holes, as he himself was into sores. Stooping down
beside him, the road-mender tried to get a peep at secret weapons in
his breast or where not; but, in vain, for he slept with his arms
crossed upon him, and set as resolutely as his lips. Fortified towns
with their stockades, guard-houses, gates, trenches, and
drawbridges, seemed to the mender of roads, to be so much air as
against this figure. And when he lifted his eyes from it to the
horizon and looked around, he saw in his small fancy similar
figures, stopped by no obstacle, tending to centres all over France.

The man slept on, indifferent to showers of hail and intervals of
brightness, to sunshine on his face and shadow, to the pattering lumps
of dull ice on his body and the diamonds into which the sun changed
them, until the sun was low in the west, and the sky was glowing.
Then, the mender of roads having got his tools together and all things
ready to go down into the village, roused him.

"Good!" said the sleeper, rising on his elbow. "Two leagues beyond
the summit of the hill?"

"About."

"About. Good!"

The mender of roads went home, with the dust going on before him
according to the set of the wind, and was soon at the fountain,
squeezing himself in among the lean kine brought there to drink, and
appearing even to whisper to them in his whispering to all the
village. When the village had taken its poor supper, it did not
creep to bed, as it usually did, but came out of doors again, and
remained there. A curious contagion of whispering was upon it, and
also, when it gathered together at the fountain in the dark, another
curious contagion of looking expectantly at the sky in one direction
only. Monsieur Gabelle, chief functionary of the place, became uneasy;
went out on his house-top alone, and looked in that direction too;
glanced down from behind his chimneys at the darkening faces by the
fountain below, and sent word to the sacristan who kept the keys of
the church, that there might be need to ring the tocsin by-and-bye.

The night deepened. The trees environing the old chateau, keeping
its solitary state apart, moved in a rising wind, as though they
threatened the pile of building massive and dark in the gloom. Up
the two terrace flights of steps the rain ran wildly, and beat at
the great door, like a swift messenger rousing those within; uneasy
rushes of wind went through the hall, among the old spears and knives,
and passed lamenting up the stairs, and shook the curtains of the
bed where the last Marquis had slept. East, West, North, and South,
through the woods, four heavy-treading, unkempt figures crushed the
high grass and cracked the branches, striding on cautiously to come in
the courtyard. Four lights broke out there, and moved away in
different directions, and all was black again.

But, not for long. Presently, the chateau began to make itself
strangely visible by some light of its own, as though it were
growing Then, a flickering streak played behind the architecture of
the front, picking out transparent places, and showing where
balustrades, arches, and windows were. Then it soared higher, and grew
broader and brighter. Soon, from a score of the great windows,
flames burst forth, and the stone faces awakened, stared out of fire.

A faint murmur arose about the house from the few people who were
left there, and there was a saddling of a horse and riding away. There
was spurring and splashing through the darkness, and bridle was
drawn in the space by the village fountain, and the horse in a foam
stood at Monsieur Gabelle's door. "Help, Gabelle! Help, every one!"
The tocsin rang impatiently, but other help (if that were any) there
was none. The mender of roads, and two hundred and fifty particular
friends, stood with folded arms at the fountain, looking at the pillar
of fire in the sky. "It must be forty feet high," said they, grimly;
and never moved.

The rider from the chateau, and the horse in a foam, clattered
away through the village, and galloped up the stony steep, to the
prison on the crag. At the gate, a group of officers were looking at
the fire; removed from them, a group of soldiers. "Help, gentlemen-
officers! The chateau is on fire; valuable objects may be saved from
the flames by timely aid! Help, help!" The officers looked towards the
soldiers who looked at the fire; gave no orders; and answered, with
shrugs and biting of lips, "It must burn."

As the rider rattled down the hill again and through the street, the
village was illuminating. The mender of roads, and the two hundred and
fifty particular friends, inspired as one man and woman by the idea of
lighting up, had darted into their houses, and were putting candles in
every dull little pane of glass. The general scarcity of everything,
occasioned candles to be borrowed in a rather peremptory manner of
Monsieur Gabelle; and in a moment of reluctance and hesitation on that
functionary's part, the mender of roads, once so submissive to
authority, had remarked that carriages were good to make bonfires
with, and that post-horses would roast.

The chateau was left to itself to flame and burn. In the roaring and
raging of the conflagration, a red-hot wind, driving straight from the
infernal regions, seemed to be blowing the edifice away. With the
rising and failing of the blaze, the stone faces showed as if they
were in torment. When great masses of stone and timber fell, the
face with the two dints in the nose became obscured: anon struggled
out of the smoke again, as if it were the face of the cruel Marquis,
burning at the stake and contending with the fire.

The chateau burned; the nearest trees, laid hold of by the fire,
scorched and shrivelled; trees at a distance, fired by the four fierce
figures, begirt the blazing edifice with a new forest of smoke. Molten
lead and iron boiled in the marble basin of the fountain; the water
ran dry; the extinguisher tops of the towers vanished like ice
before the heat, and trickled down into four rugged wells of flame.
Great rents and splits branched out in the solid walls, like
crystallisation; stupefied birds wheeled about and dropped into the
furnace; four fierce figures trudged away, East, West, North, and
South, along the night-enshrouded roads, guided by the beacon they had
lighted, towards their next destination. The illuminated village had
seized hold of the tocsin, and, abolishing the lawful ringer, rang for
joy.

Not only that; but the village, light-headed with famine, fire,
and bell-ringing, and bethinking itself that Monsieur Gabelle had to
do with the collection of rent and taxes- though it was but a small
instalment of taxes, and no rent at all, that Gabelle had got in those
latter days- became impatient for an interview with him, and,
surrounding his house, summoned him to come forth for personal
conference. Whereupon, Monsieur Gabelle did heavily bar his door,
and retire to hold counsel with himself. The result of that conference
was, that Gabelle again withdrew himself to his housetop behind his
stack of chimneys; this time resolved, if his door were broken in
(he was a small Southern man of retaliative temperament), to pitch
himself head foremost over the parapet, and crush a man or two below.

Probably, Monsieur Gabelle passed a long night up there, with the
distant chateau for fire and candle, and the beating at his door,
combined with the joy-ringing, for music; not to mention his having an
ill-omened lamp slung across the road before his posting-house gate,
which the village showed a lively inclination to displace in his
favour. A trying suspense, to be passing a whole summer night on the
brink of the black ocean, ready to take that plunge into it upon which
Monsieur Gabelle had resolved! But, the friendly dawn appearing at
last, and the rush- candles of the village guttering out, the people
happily dispersed, and Monsieur Gabelle came down bringing his life
with him for that while.

Within a hundred miles, and in the light of other fires, there
were other functionaries less fortunate, that night and other
nights, whom the rising sun found hanging across once-peaceful
streets, where they had been born and bred; also, there were other
villagers and townspeople less fortunate than the mender of roads
and his fellows, upon whom the functionaries and soldiery turned
with success, and whom they strung up in their turn. But, the fierce
figures were steadily wending East, West, North, and South, be that as
it would; and whosoever hung, fire burned. The altitude of the gallows
that would turn to water and quench it, no functionary, by any stretch
of mathematics, was able to calculate successfully.